No Land's Man

by Aasif Mandvi

  It was upon this realization that something began stirring inside of me. I had a genuine epiphany: even though I had no intention of becoming a devout Christian, perhaps there was another religious route to gaining Diane’s affections, one that could leave me with a little more integrity. I would come clean. I would reveal my true self to Diane. I would become a born-again Muslim.

  In my sexually-frustrated near-delusional state this lightbulb moment made more sense to me than it would have to a less desperate guy, but truth be told there were some pretty good rationalizations to back me up. Islam and Christianity are essentially siblings, being born of the same root religion of Judaism. The prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) met many Jews and Christians while travelling as a merchant throughout Arabia. From Jews he borrowed strict laws and discipline, and from Christians he took its view of a loving and forgiving God. The more I thought about it the more I could see that many commonalities bound the faiths together. Armed with this sense of religious communion, I decided to raise this as a discussion at our next Bible study meeting.

  “Maybe I could read passages from the Koran to discuss in the same way we discussed passages from the Bible?” I inquired as we were wrapping up that day’s discussion.

  I waited for their response with a guileless expression. Diane and her friends stared at me, then at each other, looking for clues as to what the Christian protocol would be in a moment like this. I realized they were at a loss because the point of inviting me to these Bible study meetings had been to introduce me to Christ, not to have me introduce them to Mohammad.

  After a long pause Brian, the youth minister, smiled and said, “Sure, that’d be great.”

  With that, I began what I am pretty sure was the first-ever reading of the Koran at the Young Floridian Christians on Fire Bible study meeting. Diane and her friends listened attentively as I narrated the Koranic version of the birth of Christ (I figured I would start with somewhat familiar territory), where Mary alone (no Joseph, wise men, or shepherds) gives birth to Jesus under a tree with only dates for sustenance, and Jesus’s first words are from the cradle saying, “I am indeed a servant of Allah, he hath given me revelation and made me a prophet.”

  When I was through, I looked up at their faces. Diane was smiling from ear to ear, as were her friends.

  “I’m so glad you suggested this!” said Brian. “I have many thoughts about the similarities and differences between the faiths.”

  “That was fascinating, Aasif,” Diane agreed, looking rather impressed and relieved. “I think you coming here every week and bringing us your faith is a tremendous idea.”

  Everyone else nodded in agreement. Had my crazy idea actually worked? Would I finally have sex with Diane not by pretending we were alike, but by accepting that we weren’t?

  For the next two weeks I basked in the bliss of having achieved a true spiritual union with Diane. The more discussions I led, the more I could discern a shift in Diane’s attitude toward me. She began to single me out for my opinion on things and laugh really hard at my jokes. I noticed she was suddenly wearing more makeup, had gotten a new haircut, and was wearing outfits that were far more revealing than I had ever seen her wear before. On several occasions I even caught her looking at me out of the corner of her eye. It had worked. Praise Jesus or Mohammad or both of them. Maybe for once they were actually working in tandem. Perhaps, inspired by my work here on earth, they’d decided it was time to put aside their differences and help make one boy’s sexual fantasy come true. Praise Jesusammad!!!

  I don’t think Diane even understood why or how, but it was clear that she wanted me, that some emotion was boiling up inside of her. Perhaps the Islam thing made me seem dangerous, forbidden, like one of those biker dudes from back in the day. I was infidel-icious and finally in the driver’s seat. Armed with the knowledge that I could probably get Diane to go to second base, I went back to her apartment one Sunday to make my dreams come true.

  Diane went into her bedroom and I stood outside it. I listened as she rhapsodized about that week’s Bible study and how interesting my reading of the Koran had been. That she had no idea that Jesus was considered by Muslims to have traveled during his twenties to what is modern-day Iraq. I followed her, nodding and agreeing, and then I did something I’d never done before: I entered her bedroom without being invited. Standing there in the early evening light, Diane looked especially beautiful, her hair hanging loose. Leaning against her dressing table she masked her surprise at seeing me in her room with an overly casual demeanor. We both stood there silently smiling at each other. I froze. My hands were clenched and sweaty in my pockets just as they had been many years before with Katie in the bathroom.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing . . . just, you know,” I mumbled.

  We stood there for a moment longer, staring at each other, waiting.

  “Hey, do you want to see Dirty Dancing?” she said suddenly. “I love Patrick Swayze.”

  She quickly brushed by me, back into the living room.

  As she did, I glanced down at her bed and saw peeking out from under her pillow the most recent issue of International Male. Staring at me from the front cover was a photograph of a muscle-bound tanned model in a mesh thong with a sculpted chest, perfect biceps, a stubbled chiseled jaw line, deep brown eyes, and long flowing shoulder length blond hair. Behind him the sunset formed a halo around his head as he smiled, and in perfect Spanish said, “Hola mi amigo, me llamo Jesus, y ella siempre sera mio.”4

  I nodded my head as I agreed to get the popcorn.

  4. Hello my friend, my name is Jesus, and she will always be mine.

  THE CHILI PEPPER

  AT THE AGE OF SIXTY, my father was fired from his part-time job as a Verizon customer service representative for using profanity. Even though she had heard him swear before, my mother was outraged and couldn’t believe he would use such language at any time for any reason in a professional setting.

  “Why does your father have to use such bad words?” she remarked while sitting in her armchair reading her copy of the Koran, as she did most afternoons. “The rest of the people who work there are young enough to be his grandchildren; what kind of example is that setting?”

  But I was secretly proud of him. Not because he swore, but because of the reason he did so.

  Let me first say that I am a huge fan of profanity. I know many people consider it to be coarse and uncivil and I would agree with them in most cases, but it can also be one of the most powerful tools we humans have to express something that cannot be expressed in any other way. Profanity is the chili pepper of language. If used by an idiot or a clod, it can overwhelm the discourse so the meaning is lost, but if used by a linguistic master chef, it can insert a piquant passion to the point where even though your ears may burn and you may want to rinse your mouth out, you cannot say it doesn’t sound delicious.

  Now, it was not out of character for my father to swear—he has used profanity for as long as I can remember, but only at home with us, his family. He would often mispronounce the swear words, much to the amusement of my sister and myself. He could rattle off quite a tiger-like roar of curses in Gujarati or Hindi, such as bhenchod (sister-fucker), madarchod (mother-fucker), gadhero (donkey), and buckwaas (bullshit), but his command of English profanity was less sure-footed. More often than not he would end up stringing together the wrong words: “I am shitting on you” or “I will fuck your shit” or “Bloody shit damn.” It would just make us laugh, which was clearly not the reaction he was attempting to elicit. Sometimes he would just shorten it to “shit damn,” which means even less. You wouldn’t really call someone a “shit damn,” though I suppose there could be such a thing as an actual shit dam that keeps a river of shit from flooding a nearby town. Perhaps my father was referring to the great shit dam that lays somewhere out in the American West, an ecological eyesore where he intended to throw the lawn mower he was yelling at, or where he would like to send my sister and I
when we used up all the hot water and he was forced to begin his day shivering naked under what felt like the receiving end of an ice cold shit dam.

  In spite of all that, I had never seen him swear in front of his customers or his colleagues. During all the years that he stood behind the counter at his newspaper shop or grocery store back in England, cursed out by drunken skinheads and called a Paki and a wog and told to go back to his country on a daily basis, he never shouted back at them. Perhaps after they had left he called them bastards or gadheros, but only once they were out of hearing distance. Even after coming to America, when he and my mother would travel up and down the East Coast selling cheap Indian costume jewelry on the flea market circuit, he kept his cool. Often, because of their brown skin and exotic clothing, customers assumed they couldn’t speak English and would speak to them like they were deaf children.

  “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” they would scream.

  “Fatima and I speak English,” my mother would reply, attempting to head off any misunderstanding or embarrassment.

  The customers would look relieved and say something like, “Well, good for you. So many other Mexicans won’t learn the language.”

  In spite of all this, I never heard my father lose control. This was, of course, in large part due to the fact that my mother was incredibly charming and a master salesperson. She could, with a disarming joke delivered with a self-deprecating laugh, get even the nastiest redneck to buy jewelry his wife would never wear, while simultaneously convincing him he might learn something by reading the Koran. This made it possible for my father to bite his tongue and sit quietly as my mom’s second fiddle, telling himself that if he ever did say what he thought, he would go too far, say too much, and more important than losing his dignity or my mother’s patience, he would commit the greatest act of sabotage and lose a customer.

  So it was ironic that after twenty years of living in this country, during which time he ran several failed business ventures including an import-export business, an auto paint shop, and a multilevel marketing business, my father found himself having to use the English language as his primary tool when he took a job as a customer service rep. He used to joke that he would be perfect for the job: After living with my mother for more than three decades he had become an expert at listening to people complain. Truthfully, it was the most relaxed he had been in many years. He seemed glad to be away from the expectations and stress of owning a business, and he was content to be a voice on the other end of the telephone, a problem solver. He had never really had a penchant for business; his talents would have been far better suited to being a doctor, or a mechanic, a plumber, or even a musician. He actually taught himself how to play the harmonium and many times when I was in high school he would sit on the floor in the evenings, shirtless, his tanned belly hanging over his shorts like some kind of Florida Buddha and play tunes from old Bollywood classics. He was a pretty good singer and if it had not been for years of smoking when he was a young man, he would have perhaps kept the sharp pitch of his melodic voice.

  When he was not singing, he was working in the garage, fixing the car, or cooking. Often happy to step up when my mother was too tired to cook, he would whip up some sub-continental concoction that was both mouth-and nose-watering. My father loved spicy food; he would in fact often eat raw chili peppers. Not swallow them whole, so as to avoid the burn, but actually bite into them and masticate them to mush.

  At Verizon, my father worked in a small cubicle where he took about thirty to forty calls per shift. When the call that would be his last came in, it was halfway through his shift and it began like every other call: with someone upset that they were being overcharged, or someone claiming they never made any calls to Maine, or someone whose call kept getting dropped, or someone not understanding what the extra charges on their bill were for, or someone wanting to talk to a supervisor, or someone claiming their five-year-old had made these calls by accident, or that their teenager had visited those websites without permission. Whatever the complaint, the customer service representative’s job was to stay calm and problem-solve. Periodically the supervisors would listen in on random calls, so you never knew when you were being evaluated.

  This caller’s name was Carl, and he was already upset that he had been kept on hold for as long as he had. My father apologized for the wait, to which Carl informed him he had to get to work and didn’t have time to be sitting here dealing with this shit. My father said he understood and asked Carl for his account number, however, Carl didn’t seem to understand.

  “Can I have your account number?” my father repeated.

  “I can’t understand what you are saying,” said Carl.

  My father attempted to speak more slowly, but it didn’t help.

  “I’m sorry,” Carl interrupted, “Your accent. I can’t understand your accent. Look, I don’t have time for this. Honestly, why can’t Verizon hire people who can speak English?”

  “I am speaking English,” my father said, “and I need to know your account number.”

  “What is your name?” Carl inquired.

  “My name is Hakim.”

  “Shit,” said Carl, “have I been transferred to someone in India or Pakistan or some Arab country? I can’t understand what you are saying and honestly I don’t have time for this. I have called three times about this and I just need to get this bullshit resolved. I didn’t make any calls to Palo Alto, wherever the fuck that is. I keep getting these charges on my account and I just want to talk to someone who I can understand, someone in my own fucking country, someone who I can trust, someone like me, someone who is an American. Now can I please talk to an American?”

  “I am in America,” my father replied, “I am in Tampa, Florida, and you can trust me. I work for Verizon and I can deal with your problem.”

  “Well, I don’t care where you are and honestly I don’t mean to say I can’t trust you. I apologize. I’m very frustrated and I really just want to talk to someone else. Not to be rude but can you please just transfer me to someone who speaks English?”

  “I do speak English,” my father answered. “You are assuming I am a foreigner, because I have an accent, but I am an American just like you.”

  “You don’t know what I am assuming,” came the reply, fast and furious. “Now I didn’t want to be rude to you, but here’s what you can assume. Assume my son died in Iraq, killed by one of your people. Assume that I work for the FBI and I can have you sent back to wherever you came from before you can say ‘camel shit.’ Assume I am the fucking president of the United States and I want to exercise my right in the land of the free to speak to someone I can understand. Am I making myself clear?”

  There was a moment of silence as my father stared into his reflection on his computer screen.

  “Hello? Hello?” Carl repeated on the other end of the line.

  “No problem,” my father finally responded. “Let me see what I can do.”

  “Thank you” said Carl. “I appreciate that, I just really need to get this resolved.”

  Objectively, it was a perfectly reasonable request, my father thought, one that could have been easily rectified. He looked up from his computer at the other operators smiling and conversing with customers. He could see Joan, the young woman who was working her way through college, and Mike the middle-aged dad who had been laid off from his job selling insurance. They were typical Americans, who could have handled this call with aplomb. There was also Barry the supervisor. He could hand the call to Barry—that would be the procedural thing to do in a situation like this, he thought. My father smiled, put his headset on, and pressed the button to take Carl off hold.

  “Unfortunately, no one else is available to help you, so it’s me or no one,” he said.

  Perhaps it was the anonymity of the experience, neither man needing to see the other’s face, that allowed them to throw civility out the window and say what they said in the following five seconds.

  “Listen, you lying raghead kabob-
smelling shit-for-brains sand nigger,” Carl’s voice came back through the phone line, strong and rattling like machine-gun fire, “I want you to transfer me to your supervisor in the next three seconds or I will fly down to Tampa fucking Florida and kick your shit-stained ass back to the shithole you came from, do you understand?”

  That’s when it happened. It was as if one of those chili peppers my father had eaten all those years ago came up through his stomach, through his throat, and out through his mouth. With it, it brought the power of profanity and poetry together in a single moment, like an orgasm thirty years in the making. My father took a breath.

  “Shit damn!” he yelled. “Fuck to you!” And he hung up the phone.

  Barry, the twenty-something supervisor sitting a few feet away, dropped his headset and came storming out of his office.

  “What happened? Why didn’t you transfer the call, Hakim?” he asked. “If a customer is belligerent you just transfer the call to a supervisor, you know the rules. Under no circumstances is it okay to tell a customer to . . . to . . . whatever it is that you even said.”

  “I know,” said my father.

  “You know we can hear you, Hakim,” explained Barry. “Why would you say something like that when we can hear you?”

  “He called me dirty names,” said my father.

  “Yes, that’s right, he did,” Barry replied, “and that was not right, and we all understand, but under no circumstances, I mean no circumstances are we allowed to swear back at customers. It’s policy. I mean, what would happen if we swore at everyone who called us names?”

  “I don’t know,” said my father, “what would happen?”

  “We wouldn’t be America’s number-one cell phone provider, Hakim. That’s what would happen.”

  My father smiled in agreement. He knew what was coming next, and yet ironically he had not felt this good, this energized in many years.